


Things Happen

by se_parsons



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27518026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/se_parsons/pseuds/se_parsons
Summary: Originally posted: 02 Mar 2001Things happen, and then there are consequences.  And, for this one, let's just play it 1013's way.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Kudos: 6





	Things Happen

Things Happen

Three days after they buried Mulder, Scully was three days into her forced exile from the X-Files " the first three days of a weeks psychiatric leave of absence. She wished she was three days into a bender with a couple of bottles of Irish whiskey under her belt, but she was too afraid of what that might do to the baby to risk it. So, instead, she was cleaning out her closets. She was cleaning them out in preparation of the cleaning that would begin the next morning over at Mulder's apartment. She had to have places to put things, after all.

The thought of sorting through his possessions made her feel even more like the widow she wasn't. Listed as the "next of kin" on his medical files, his insurance policies and, it turned out, in his will, she had all the responsibility with none of the good memories of a life together to fall back on. She was even pregnant with his child, just like a real widow, though this child had been created in a dish in a lab somewhere and not from love at all.

She had almost nothing to remember of that. She'd had exactly two kisses from the man, once on New Years and the other the day shed been disappointed by the failure of the first in vitro procedure. And that had been done sneakily and half-heartedly when he'd thought she was too upset to notice. In eight years, shed spent a scant few minutes in his arms and exactly two nights in bed with him, once while he was delirious and sweating from being drugged and the other when he was utterly jetlagged and oblivious to her presence. That was it. And it was all there would ever be.

It had always seemed to her like there would be enough time for them later. After they had discovered Mulder's "truth", after they were safe. But that wasn't how things had worked out at all. They had run out of time before they'd ever taken any for themselves.

Scully hadn't cried. She was too angry, and the tears hadn't come. But she could feel them there, in the back of her head, lodged in her chest like a weight. Maybe she would be able to cry them someday. Maybe someday there would be enough time passed to have gotten over the numbing emptiness inside her where Mulder should have been.

Scully stood on a sturdy kitchen chair to reach the top shelf in her hall closet. She wasn't about to risk something so potentially dangerous as a ladder. Not in her condition.

Of course, the child had already survived being thrown across a room by an alien bounty hunter, the insertion into her body of a parasitic organism the size of Cleveland, and the Lord knew what sort of procedure that had been performed on her when she'd thought she was getting an amnio. It made her wonder whether the child was really hers at all. Or if it were hers and not really Mulder's. An alien/human hybrid placed inside her, who only knew when. She thought about that all the time. She dreamed about it at night. But there was nothing she could do about it, even if it were true. Nothing short of kill it. And she wasn't willing to risk that, on the chance that it might really be hers. It might really be Mulder's. It might be the only thing she had left of him other than a few not-at-all-comforting memories.

There was no knock on her door, and she heard the key turn in the lock and the deadbolt slide back into its housing. She turned in time to see the front door open and to see him standing there, big as life, impossible as a sphinx.

"Go away," Scully said, holding the box of things that needed sorting, that she'd just removed from the topmost shelf. You have no right to come here. You have no right to wear that face."

It stepped into her home and shut the door behind it. She waited for it to threaten her.

It looked around instead with bland curiosity. Then it saw what it was looking for, her gun and holster on the top of the sideboard. It walked over to it and picked up the weapon.

"Do you think I don't know what you are?" she asked it, her voice sounding shrill to her own ears, like a shrew, like a nagging wife. "Do you think killing me while wearing that face will make it bother me more?"

"I'm not here to kill you," it said, taking her weapon out of the holster and putting it in the pocket of its insulated vest. "I just wanted to be certain you didn't kill me until Id talked to you. I know that you know how to do it."

"What do you want, then?" she asked, climbing down from the chair with her box.

"Your aid," it said. "I require your assistance to do something that must be done. I have chosen this form because no one will question him if he is seen in your company, doing the things that need doing."

"You're a little too late for that," she told it. "We buried that body three days ago. We buried it in the ground. Everyone knows that he's dead. Everyone, it seems, but you."

"What are you talking about?" it asked wearing a look of surprise on Mulder's face. 

"Mulder's dead. His body was dumped in a field in Montana seven days ago. We buried him three days ago after the autopsy results came in and we knew we wouldn't need him any more," Scully said, setting her box down on the dining table. She nearly smiled at the lie shed just told. She would always need him more.

"How was he killed?" it asked. "Why?"

"How should I know?" Scully said. "It's your people that did it. They took him from Bellefleur, Oregon last May and dumped him dead in a field in Montana last week along with several others."

"Not our people, obviously, or I would have been told," it said shaking Mulder's head. "This is very inconvenient."

Scully was too angry to answer the thing. She just gritted her teeth until her jaws ached with it.

It stood for some time staring off into nothingness.

"I do not know who to contact now. I do not know who to be," it said. "If Mulder is not alive and the smoking man or the others can not be found, I don't know how I'm going to be able to accomplish my directive."

"I don't care about your directive," Scully said. "I don't care if you accomplish it, or anything else. I just want my keys back and I want you to get out of my house. How did you get my keys, anyway?"

"I got them from these clothes. They were in the pocket along with the keys to his apartment and what I assume are vehicles," it explained.

"If you had his clothes, then you're with the ones that killed him," Scully snarled. "Why lie to me? You know it doesn't make any difference."

"You are weak," it said. "You are attached to others of your kind. We know this about you. We know how to manipulate your weakness. But we did not know that he was dead. He has escaped us so many times before."

"You're right about that," Scully said with a sigh, crossing the room to take its arm in both her hands and to squeeze it to feel the reality of something so much like Mulder's arm beneath her hands. "We are weak. You are so much like him when you take this shape."

"I am him when I take this shape," it said. "I know his molecular structure. I am his molecular structure. You are very weak even compared to your kind if you know all this and still you want to touch me in this manner."

"I would like to touch you in another manner," Scully said. "May I?"

"I will not couple with you, if that is what you are thinking," it said primly. "I find that ridiculous and an enormously inefficient way to procreate. And you are short and round and hairy and incredibly ugly."

"I.... I would just like to put my arms around you, if that's all right," Scully said ashamedly. "I... I never got to say goodbye to him. And now I'll never have the chance."

"Will you help me complete my directive?" it asked, throwing her a sly look from Mulder's eyes.

"If you do this for me," she nodded. "I'll help you find Jeremiah Smith."

"Then you may touch me and indulge yourself," it told her, sounding pleased that she understood its mission. "I will even put my arms around you as well if you like. As a gesture of good faith, that means as much to us as it does to you."

"Thank you," Scully said. "That would be very nice."

She moved close to it, unzipped the insulated vest and slipped her arms around the familiar-feeling body beneath. She closed her eyes and buried her face in its neck. It even smelled like him. Perhaps it hadn't lied when it said it became him on a molecular level. It put its arms around her as well, stiffly at first, but as she relaxed against it, it too relaxed, perhaps following her lead, and the embrace became more normal, more Mulder.

"My chin fits on the top of your head," it said, as it tucked her up against itself in just the right way.

"Yes," she choked out. "Yes, it does."

Scully ran her hands over the muscled back, up under the insulated vest. She could feel the shoulder blades firm beneath her fingers, the ribcage beneath the layer of flesh, the hard knobs of the spine. She knew this body nearly as well as she knew her own, after so many years of caring for it. She knew the changes in it. She knew every scar and limitation. She knew the way it stood and the way it slept and the way it walked. She knew its habits.

"Oh, Mulder," she said. "Oh, Mulder, goodbye."

Scully wrapped her arms all the way around him and then slowly moved her hands in a caressing gesture from the center of the back around and down the ribcage. Yes, she knew it would like that because she knew everything about this body. She rubbed the center of its back with her left hand as her right slipped Mulder's gun from the shoulder holster.

Before the startled creature could react, she had the gun at the back of the neck and had already pulled the trigger. She stepped back and let the body slump to the floor and begin to dissolve. The satisfaction that she felt watching it liquify made her not even begrudge it the cost of the replacement carpet.

-30-


End file.
